We have a lot of exterior doors.  Unfortunately, for 4 sets of French doors, we set the door thresholds right on the water proofing flashing underneath, not leaving much room for the aesthetic treatment above the flashing.  At the time, our stone & tile contractor told us it wasn’t a problem, but that turned out to not be true.

Here is a door done properly.

As you can see, we have over an inch to lay down the stone and not exceed the height of the door threshold.  On the 4 sets that were done incorrectly,we have only about 1/4 inch, far to little for stone + thin set mortar.

We puzzled over possible solutions for months, but nothing seemed plausible.

Finally, we decided the only solution was to cut out the existing thresholds, and rebuild a new threshold higher up, to give us more room.  I resisted this solution for a long time as:

• It voids the door warranty
• We have to cut the doors, which are a combination of wood, metal cladding, and functional hardware running up and down the door from the top to the bottom
• We have to reposition the weather stripping, creating a new channel

The reason this matters so much is that, some of the doors will get significant rain exposure in storms.  The water proofing need to work properly, otherwise we will get water intrusion.

Now that we’ve taken the plunge and just about finished the first door, it looks like it will work.

First, cutting the doors was done very nicely by one of the best carpenters that has worked on the house.  He is the measure three times cut once kind of guy.  He also created the new inner wooden threshold that goes on top of the existing one, and has a new dado-channel for the weather stripping.  All this turned out looking just about as good as the original doors.

Here is the new inner threshold on one door.

Cutting the thresholds was messy, but we got it done.

Now that the stone is installed on one of the door sets, it looks pretty good.

Once the stone is grouted, we just have to install the outer weather strip, and we are finally done.  And not a moment too soon, as the door / window people will be back in a week to do the final adjustment.